Dashboard burn up. What do I do now??

Brave Frank · August 29, 2013, 04:42 AM

So since some of my gauges are currently not working on my 76 brave, I thought I'd, you know, just pull the dash off and take a look. Easy, right? No....quite a fight actually, but I got it off enough to smell burning wire. Looking behing the dash I found that a prong had busted off the wireing harness to the gauges on the right side of the dash. It was broken before I got there but my pulling the dash managed to fry up part of the zig-zag lines of the ancient circut board. So how do I fix this mess now, or do I need a new board behind all my gauges?

HandyDan · August 29, 2013, 10:40 PM

Welcome to the "I Fried the Circuit Board" Club.

LJ-TJ · August 30, 2013, 09:45 AM

So where's the pic's Hm?

Brave Frank · August 31, 2013, 05:49 PM

it worked! LOL

Brave Frank · August 31, 2013, 06:05 PM

You can see in the first pic that the path has been fried just south of the prongs. You can also see the 5 prongs have been reduced to 3.....Here is the female wire receiver with the missing prong. Im not good at soldering at all, so do I have to replace the entire dashboard motherboard? (I dont know what else to call it) Or do I just go without that set of gauges?? LOL What would you do??

Brave Frank · August 31, 2013, 06:20 PM

Here is the cluster of gauges on the right side of my 76 dash.

LJ-TJ · August 31, 2013, 07:14 PM

Is this a little better picture of what your talking about.?

Stripe · August 31, 2013, 08:38 PM

Gauges? Gauges? We don't need no steenking Gauges!!
Just how "Not good" at soldering are you? Your problem can be fixed with a bit of soldering and some wiring of the correct gauge.
You can get "Good Enough" with about half an hour of practicing on some tin cans (TIN, so no soda cans, dog food cans are perfect.) and scrap wiring and you'd be surprised just how easy it becomes. A friend of mine years ago took a tin can a sharpie to draw imaginary circuits, some wire and a piece of paper, threw it at me and said "Connect the circuits drawn on the can like I drew on the paper". After a while I got the hang of it. After that, fixing the PCB(printed Circuit Board) will be a snap. Otherwise, I am going through Oregon in about a week and if you want, I can stop by and do it.

BUT! Before fixing the problem, make sure that "Problem wire" is dealt with.

James E Vining · August 31, 2013, 09:22 PM

Ya Like Coachman said, I was Forced into Learning how to repair Circuits when I bought some Musical Equipment and decided to replace some of the Guitar PU's and Potentiometers and found out what they charge at a Repair shop, Plus I bought a Peavey CS1000X amplifier with some burnt circuits and found the local electronic repair shop wanted 5X the amount I paid for the unit to repair 3 Solder Circuit Lines and replace a Switch and a Resistor.
The Coolest trick I found was using Some Alligator clamps on the Wires or any place you can connect between what you are soldering and what you do not want to overheat, The clamp works as a Heat Sink to help keep the Items you do not want getting to hot from overheating, This was crucial when soldering Potentiometers, capacitors, resistors etc.
Plus Be careful not to use a soldering iron that gets to hot, I first started with a Weller 8200-N 100/140 watt Gun and it worked great for the large Amplifier Circuits but was way to much for the smaller Wires, Capacitors, Potentiometers etc.
I then found a Stahl SSVT Variable Temp Soldering Station which allows you to adjust from 302F to 842F so you can safely solder pretty much anything electronic plus they have different size and angle Tips you can get to use if needed, The Link to where I purchased mine is
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?partnumber=374-100
Hopefully this will be helpful to you or possibly any other people interested in soldering their circuits repairing wiring etc.
If you have any Questions about the alligator clamps etc. feel free to PM me etc.

James E Vining · August 31, 2013, 09:29 PM

Oh one thing I left off was I found that on some Items using a Paste Flux on the circuits really helped to allow the solder to adhere better, I had a couple Items where I cleaned with Electronic Cleaner and a Wire brush and I still had issues getting the solder to adhere properly, I was using Rosin Core Solder too but there was something keeping the solder from properly adhering but once I used a very minimal amount of the paste flux it solved the problem and I have not had any Issues soldering anything since, I Even soldered my Transmission Shift cable at the Shifter end to keep it form flexing and bending which to this day still is working like a brand new cable.
Be sure you Using a Flux and/or Solder Wire that is made or recommended for electronics as there are Acid Core Solders and Flux pastes that are not recommended for Circuit boards electronic connections etc.

DaveVA78Chieftain · August 31, 2013, 10:06 PM

The prong that broke off (black wire) is used by Amp meter. The other amp meter lead is the red wire. The burnt trace is the ground circuit for the instrument lamps. That race goes under the connector but is not connected to it. What you most likely did is scrape the broken pin across the ground trace which was a direct short from the chassis battery to ground. Be sure to disconnect the batteries when working on these circuits.

For the broken pin, you can simply pull the black lead from the connector run a jumper wire from it to the Amp gauge pin. You will need to solder a jumper lead to the instrument ground trace to the the ground post on the board.

Dave

Brave Frank · September 01, 2013, 04:31 PM

Coachman, I still have the dash partially attached by wires and heater control cables behind my steering wheel. There is very little room to pull it out so far and the 2 angled side pieces of the gauge cluster are barely hanging in place. (Old thin plastic) What do you mean deal with the problem wire? Looks like I forgot rule #1 with electronics...disconnect battery!! (I originally was looking to check wire connections & bulbs!) When are you coming down to PDX? Will you be bringing your rig?? Message me for my #

Like I said, Im still learning how bad of shape my rig is in. When we drove from AZ to Portland OR. we had to use a flashlight to see the speedometer at night! Dave, that explains why I had no gauge cluster lights!! LOL Thank you- I might try that, especially if there is no way to get a new one of those printed circuit boards.......or is there?? LOL
Do you think I need a new set of 4 color wires or will it be enough to do the jump? That doesn't seem too bad, especially if I get a temp controlled soldering gun and some help. Mine only has HOT!

Could this problem have caused the brake light to stay on as well? (I know it could be the brakes are bad!) LOL Not even there yet-

Stripe · September 01, 2013, 07:03 PM

If you're not in too much of a hurry, the Ground Ship Aluminum Goose will be launching in just under a week.. I will pm a couple of days prior to launch.

By "problem wire" I meant the one that shorted to the PCB. Maybe put tape on it or a wire cap, whichever is easiest to put on as I see your dash is still a tight fit to work around..

What Dave has pictured is how I got my '77s' dash to operate. I had some traces on mine actually separating, so I used what I call "Engineers' Patch". Back in the day, (you see this only on very old PCB's) engineers would use wire patches on PCB's to affect certain upgrades to mistakes in engineering. So instead of pulling all the newly made PCB's off the assembly line (wasting money) they would do these "Patch" fixes. Pull apart an old IBM 8088 some time and you may see it. Very thin wire.